Grounded in the cognitive approach to speech act theory, whereby the boundaries between speech act categories are perceived as fuzzy, resulting in their directness/ indirectness being viewed as a matter of degree, the paper investigates the ambiguity of indirect speech acts found in the discourse of customer testimonials. The analysis is based on a corpus of 150 customer testimonials published on the home pages of 7 retailing companies offering their products online. The study reveals some interesting patterns in the persuasive/promotional use of (often ambiguous) micro speech acts contributing to the realisation of the macro-act of praising. It then attempts to rationalise customer testimonials as acts of boasting performed by organisations using customer quotes as word-of-mouth tools.